God-King of Hostilistan

Entries tagged with my best guy forrest

So, I failed out of mini-wrimo pretty quickly. When I signed up in October, I didn't know I was about to jump back into RPing, and my new game started on the same day and... yeah, I've basically had no interest in anything else. And technically it's writing, I'm writing so much every day in the game, but... RPing is not what I need help with. Mini-wrimo is supposed to help me with my prose fiction projects, and it's not doing that for me this year. I can't even bring myself to care, because oh my god this game is too much fun, why do anything else, ANYTHING. ELSE.

In RL stuff, beginning of the month was also my second anniversary with Forrest. We did a nice little day trip to Makalawena, which is a GORGEOUS but hard to get to beach in Kona. The following weekend we had a little getaway to a cabin in Kalopa State Park.

Last weekend was crazy busy with dancing, climaxing with THE Glenn Miller Orchestra and all of us Hep Cats showing up in force to teach and perform and be awesome on the dance floor. I got all dolled up in my new red dress and did my hairs and make-up all period and wore my cute vintage-style dance shoes and felt SO FABULOUS. Look! (I'm on the left.) And look again!

Again, mostly my energies have been wrapped up in Snowblind. I am having hella fun, these people are my people, by which I mean TERRIBLE PEOPLE, I've never felt so warmly welcomed so quickly in a game, and I'm constantly crying laughing in the Snowblind plurks, everything is shame boners and severed toes and how many snowbos can we cram into the shower at once, and also how can I murder my character today?

Today what had me crying laughing was this plurk thread; I've filed all the serial numbers off and done some minor editing and I hope they don't mind me reposting this without permission, but.

I don't post a lot of real journal-y type posts anymore, but this evening was just a really nice one. It was a blazer of a hot day, and once Forrest was done with work and fiddling with his truck and fiddling with his friend's truck, he came to get me and we raced the setting sun to King's Landing. It beat us, but we found a good spot to sit on the rocks and drink Dos Equis and watch the waves roll in and throw froth and spray in the air while the light slowly changed colors and faded over Mauna Kea. It looked kinda like this. (As you can see, I've stopped even trying to pretend I'm not smug on Twitter.) Venus was high in the sky to the west and Forrest gave me a nudge with his elbow, and the moon was rising fat and yellow through the trees behind us. And then when the tide came to get us we left and drove back in the deepening dark with nostalgic 90's alt-rock on the radio and the full moon glaring like a spotlight, Jupiter hanging next to it, and when we got back Forrest blackened some tuna and we drank more beer and laughed over dinner with friends and it was all just very nice, you know?

This weekend, we had an Adventure. It was not the adventure we had meticulously planned, but it was indeed so very, very adventurous.

By "we" I mean myself, Forrest, eight of our closest friends, and another group of...I think seven or so hooligans?

The adventure we planned was this: we wanted to kayak to either Honoke‘a or Honopue Valley, camp out for two nights, and enjoy ourselves fishing and lobster diving and hunting and surfing and exploring sea caves and standing in waterfalls and swimming and gathering coconuts/liliko‘i/‘ulu/bananas/mangoes/avocados/citrus/heart of palm and making big fires and drinking and stuffing ourselves with food. Our first group of ten would launch Friday morning; the second group would follow 24 hours later. We planned to launch from Keokea Beach Park, the closest sheltered launch site, and paddle down the coast, passing Pololu, Honokane Nui, and Honokane Iki Valleys to Honoke‘a or Honopue, which none of us had been in, as they are practically unreachable by land. We organized the distribution of kayaks, dry bags, water, food, fishing/diving/hunting gear, and communal supplies. We scouted the launch site and kayak route on Google Earth. Knowing that Hamakua is a famously treacherous coast, we scrutinized the wind and wave forecasts; we expected Friday to be the roughest day, but not too rough, with conditions calming down to a 5 knot wind and 1 foot swell on Saturday and Sunday as the area settled into a weak low pressure system. We decided Group One would leave Hilo at 3 a.m. on Friday, arriving at Keokea by 6 a.m. and launching in the pre-sunrise twilight to take advantage of the calmest part of the day; we'd have an easier time on the return trip, with calmer seas and the wind at our backs. If we arrived at Keokea and it was too rough to launch, Plan B was to drive to the Kona side of the island and kayak-camp to a beach on that coast, which would be much calmer.

Last one! I'mma incorporate the last 24 hours. And also the future. Because I DO WHAT I WANT.

THING ONE! Yesterday was Forrest's birthday, so I met him and a bunch of his friends at Hilo Burger Joint for beers and burgers for lunch. Later in the afternoon I picked up a bunch of food to-go from his favorite restaurant, Tina's Garden Gourmet Cafe (it's only open for dinner on weekends), and then later we went and had a brief Thai fusion evening picnic at Onomea Bay. And we had a successful dance class and then we went to his place and ate leftover mango sticky rice and did our homework, and he opened his presents from me and Mom and he liked them. :)

THING TWO! The visiting Cornell Ph.D that my lab is hosting had his talk yesterday afternoon. I got there a bit late because my order at Tina's took longer to fill than I was expecting, but the bit I did see was super fascinating, and there was a loooooong period of question-asking afterwards, and when I asked my question he perked up and was like, "Aha, yes, I was hoping someone would ask that!!" and I practically wiggled in academic joy. And he's super intelligent and knowledgeable and enthusiastic and I don't think he's ever been to Hawai‘i, and I'm taking him on a couple of field trips tomorrow and Friday, so that will be fun.

THING THREE! This weekend I'm taking a bit of a break and only going up to Hakalau for the day on Friday. Saturday afternoon Forrest and I are driving over to Waikoloa for an America concert, and we're staying in a fancy hotel, and spending Sunday doing relaxing beach stuff on the Kona side of the island. I'm so excited to kick back a little, I've been working so hard. @_@

And that is all the positivity you're getting out of me. You know me, I'm so negative. :P

Oh look I'm actually doing this two days in a row, I'M SO AWESOME, YEEEEAAAHHH~!!

THING ONE! Talked my darling dear friend Chris on the phone today, which I don't do nearly often enough. (She was one of my closest friends at college practically from day one.) It was her birthday on Saturday, which prompted a wee bit of phone tag, and we finally caught each other at a good time tonight. So that was nice.

THING TWO! There's this thing in Hawai‘i where we have chickens just sort of wandering around, wild, don't belong to anyone. Mostly they're moa, or Red Junglefowl, that the Hawaiians brought with them, but all kinda interbred with other domestic chicken breeds. Since we a) don't have a dog or a cat anymore, and b) we throw papaya skins around under our trees to encourage chickens to dig coqui frogs out of the leaf litter and eat them, hens and chickies like to come and hang out in our yard and forage where it's friendly and safe. ANYWAY, there's this one black silkie chicken that's been wandering around the last couple years or so, and she's got her second clutch of little half-silkie chicks, TINY BLACK PEEPING RIDICULOUS FLOOFBALLS AAAAAAAAAAAHHH they make me so happy. T__T

THING THREE! Forrest wanted to have a "found foods" dinner, so I'm sitting on a lawn chair in the dark, drinking a beer while he pokes at the grill. I brought a breadfruit, and he's got some oysters from his job at the aquaculture research facility and lobsters from his lobster dive and heart of palm that he brought back from his kayak camping trip up on the north coast last weekend and it's gonna be awesome, basically.

Current Mood:stressed earlier but pretty great now! :)

Current Location:Forrest's house! :D

Current Music:whatever kind of mellow hang-out music F's got on his iPod

I continue to be terrible about this consecutive days thing but eh, this is still a pretty impressive posting schedule for me. ...TMI warning, it's day one of what I like to call my Time of Power, and my uterus is trying to escape, so it's harder than usual to be positive, but I am committed to this meme, so I'm going to be positive WHETHER MY UTERUS LIKES IT OR NOT.

THING ONE! I had breakfast in bed with my boyfriend, then I went to class with my boyfriend, then I had lunch with my boyfriend, then I went shopping for a birthday present for my boyfriend. (His birthday is on Monday.) ...I like my boyfriend. :)

THING TWO! Had to lead a discussion with my fellow grad students about our assigned reading, and I felt good about it! Filled the allotted time, encouraged discussion, underlined the important points, didn't feel nervous. Yay! :D

THING THREE! In deference to my fragile state and to the amount of things I've gotten done already today, I'm giving myself the rest of the evening lying flat on my back on my comfy couch with a bottle of Angry Orchard and episode three of The Roosevelts.

mithen tagged me to do this meme, and even though I'm still in the middle of another meme I figure no time like the present. My LiveJournal has been much less journal-y lately so this is a good excuse to get back to that. Plus, positivity, yay!

Rules are: for five consecutive days post three positive things that have happened, plus tag three other people to do the same, so the positivity keeps growing.

I'm going to be in Hakalau for the next three days with no internet, so I'll be ruining the consecutive thing right off the bat. I'll either make one post to cover all three days, or just skip a couple days and have Sunday be my Day 2.

Tagging cattraine, burned_phoenix, and hardboiledbaby. Like Mithen, I figure if five consecutive days is tough for you, I'd rather get five non-consecutive good things than nothing at all, so go for it!

THING ONE. Well this was last night but it's within 24 hours so screw it, also I DO WHAT I WANT. Had date night with the boy, yes that boy, still the same boy since A YEAR AGO this is so weird for me, anyway we had dinner and went to see Jersey Boys, which was a nice enough date in and of itself, but then we went to Honoli‘i (the local surf spot) and made a driftwood fire on the black sand beach and sat on a towel and drank red wine from champagne flutes and watched the light of the waning moon glitter on the waves and shared stories about our youth and it was loooooooverly.

THING TWO. I really enjoyed class today! I mean, I enjoy class every day, I picked this landscape ecology class entirely because I adore the professor, JP, who is always entertaining. And the subject material has been interesting, but this is the first time it's approached the OMG COOL levels I routinely felt in JP's biodiversity class last semester. I feel like I'm really learning stuff, in a personal discovery, "Wow that's so amazing, THIS PLANET IS SO AMAZING~!" kind of way. Also, the boy is taking this class with me, and he hasn't had JP before, and he commented afterward how much he's enjoying the prof and the class, and I just kind of felt delighted that I was able to share this with him, like, YAY NOW YOU CAN BE IN ACADEMIC LOVE WITH JP ALSO, YAAAAAAY~!

THING THREE. After class I went to the lunch shop that I am in a romantic relationship with, Sweet Cane Café. I got fresh-pressed cane juice with ginger and their roasted veggie sandwich, both of which are SO DELICIOUS and also fresh and good for you and I just wanted to curl around my order and cuddle it my GOSH it was tasty. ♥_♥

Mostly what's up with my life, and the reason I'm so scarce, is grad school. I'm taking three more credits than last semester, and I'm enjoying my classes lots but DAMN there's a lot of work to do. I'm busy all the time just trying to keep up.

I have squeezed in some fun times, sometimes probably more than I should, like, I was SUCH a slacker over Christmas break. But I had an AWESOME camping trip with Forrest on a lonely, remote beach, I had a BRILLIANT family Christmas visit on O‘ahu with dancing and hiking and beaching and Hobbiting and archaeology and being silly with relatives and SO MUCH FOOD. And my darling Melissa came to visit me for New Year's and we watched movies and read Hawkeye comics and went on adventures with Forrest, lava adventures, kayak adventures, hiking-in-a-rainy-valley-and-being-menaced-by-flash-floods adventures. So I didn't get a lot of work done, but vacation was AWESOME.

My darling Maile got married to Fred a couple of weeks ago in Kona, so my darlings Chris and Kate and Garrett came from the mainland and we had more shenanigans. It was a Friday morning beach wedding followed by an awesome fancy brunch, and Maile was GORGEOUS and she and Fred were both sick so Fred had to keep drinking water and they were both sassy at each other and it was all very cute and lovely. I like Fred a lot. Chris and Kate and Forrest and I harassed some sea life and Forrest and I disgusted Chris by eating sea weed off of the rocks when there was AN AWESOME BRUNCH RIGHT OVER THERE, OH MY GOD YOU TWO DESERVE EACH OTHER, etc. We lounged around by the pool and on the beach, and then all of Maile's Whitman Friends Plus Significant Others and all of Maile's La Pietra/O'ahu Friends Plus Significant Others went to Kona Brew Pub together to have amazing food and amazing beer and get to know each other (I had an amazing beer made with lemongrass and ginger, and then an awesome Hefeweizen). Forrest and I gave up our Saturday to hang out with Chris and Kate, and we did the Farmer's Market and a beachside picnic and poked around Lili‘uokalani Gardens and Coconut Island and got smoothies at What's Shakin' and saw Rainbow Falls and ‘Akaka Falls, and then Chris and Kate and I went swing dancing, and it was good. Then I gave them my car and let them have their own shenanigans while I studied my ass off, although we did get together for dinner at Forrest's and a showing of my high school Beowulf movie project, which is always a hilarious time.

Speaking of Forrest, in case you were wondering, yes, that's going well. Extremely well. I'm kind of...um...madly in love? Which is a new and strange thing for me? He's gorgeous and kind and fun and smart and he treats me well and we're massively compatible and have more and more in common all the time, so...that's nice. (Also he lurked around this journal and found and read some of my fanfic and he REALLY LIKED THAT ONE DEPRESSING BATMAN ONE, I feel so fucking validated.) I've solved the constant-struggle-over-who-gets-to-pay-for-things problem by introducing a rock-paper-scissors system, which is hilarious and is working out well. (Incidentally and hilariously, the first time we tried it we tied 5 or 6 times in a row before I figured out how to break the pattern and beat him. Because again, WE ARE ACTUALLY THE SAME PERSON A LOT OF THE TIME.) On Valentine's Day I went all old-school with paper, glue, pens, and scissors and made him a badass card version of my Darwin "I select you, naturally" icon with photos of Darwin and natural selection in action. (There were pigeon skulls. He loved it.) We had dinner and cocktails at the Rim Restaurant on the edge of the volcano, then camped overnight at Kulanaokuaiki Campground and had a lazy campground brunch with eggs and bacon and fruit and POG mimosas. It was awesome. (Can we talk about how this is the first Valentine's Day in my ENTIRE LIFE where I've had a significant other? I missed it by like TWO DAYS last time. ...So that was weird, but nice.)

So that's mostly what's been going on with me. Aaaaaaand I'd better get back to it. Sigh.

My grand-aunt gave it to me when I was a kid; she says she "found it"; I've never asked what that means exactly, but I sometimes think it means "on the sidewalk". Anyway, I was going through my EGYPT STUFF IS COOL phase (which, like my horse phase, I never really grew out of), so I was like OMG COOL NECKLACE. I used to bring it with me when I traveled, because it was black and silver, and could be dressy or casual, so basically it went with everything. Often times it was the only jewelry piece I brought with me.

Over time, it got so that it didn't feel right if I traveled without it, ever. I developed a mild superstition about it. When there was turbulence, or if I had any passing anxious plane-crash fantasy, I would touch the necklace and feel better. I started to wear it all the time when I wasn't traveling. It was my Lucky Necklace, and as I said, it matched with everything. When artistic friends sketched my likeness, they invariably included the ankh; it was a part of me. I had to change the cord once or twice, but the pendant stuck with me. I used to worry; what the hell would I do if I ever lost it?

Last September I went on a trip to Europe with my mother, and of course the ankh came with me, through limestone mountains and over river rapids and into the Adriatic Sea. We visited my darling Neve in Bulgaria, and on a walk through the autumn woods on a mountain called Rila, my ankh broke in half, seemingly entirely at random. By the time I noticed, the bottom half was lost forever in the fallen leaves.

I was heartbroken, as you can imagine. But what could I do? I had to be zen about it. There was no getting it back, and getting upset would do nothing for me. And I'm not actually superstitious, so I knew I'd be perfectly safe traveling without it. But I felt naked without it.

Friends suggested I buy a replacement ankh, but... I couldn't just buy any old ankh from Hot Topic, it had to be special. I was determined to find a replacement pendant, another ankh or something else, but I knew I'd have to wait for it to come to me.

...So on my date with Forrest on Sunday (four days ago), I happened to give him the short version of this story. On our date tonight, he gives me this:( Picture under cut because big. )

I was procrastinating, he says, so I made it for you. (Read, PERSONALLY CARVED BY HAND.) It's abalone. I thought it matched your eyes, which are, by the way, beautiful, he says. He says, the brass bead at the top is from Ethiopia, it's a hundred years old.

...........................I SWEAR TO GOD I DON'T THINK HE IS ACTUALLY REAL SOMETIMES, WHAT THE HELL.

The ankh is perfect and beautiful, I will wear it all the time and keep it forever. Possibly I will also keep Forrest forever, oh my god.

Also tonight was the first rock concert I've been to since I left Portland. IT WAS SO EXCELLENT. Opening band was Mike Love and Paula Fuga and... whoever their drummer was, doing some local reggae that I actually kind of adored. Never seen Fuga live before... goddamn that woman can sing. The main act was Nahko and Medicine for the People, back in Hilo again after a year of touring. When I heard Medicine for the People two years ago they were a reggae band. Now they're straight-up, punch-you-in-the-face rock and roll with flavors of tribal drums and beat-boxing, with subtle reggae, world music, and Hawaiian influences and a world peace/First Nations issues/environmentalism sensibility. They're mixed-race and mixed-gender and full of bouncy energy and badassery and adorableness, especially Nahko, omg what a lovely and hilarious human being. I bought their new album, and I'll be keeping a close eye on them in the future.

...Gods I've missed rock concerts. I had so much fun.

So worth the... almost no sleep I'm going to get tonight. Early morning drive to Hakalau to catch birds, WHOO.

ETA: IN A HORRIBLE IRONIC TWIST, after staying up to 3 a.m. making lunch for the field and printing papers to read during downtime, I slept straight through my alarm and the group left without me, thus negating my reason for making lunch and printing papers. I feel like a shit head because E asked for my help and I let him down. FML. ...On the plus side, I really need the sleep and the study time? ......But srsly fml.

Ok, that expression "knock on wood", you say something and then you realize maybe you just jinxed yourself so you knock your knuckles against something made of wood to ward yourself. So you know how instead of knocking on actual wood, you habitually knock against your own skull as part of a goofy self-deprecating joke dating back more than a decade?

Yeah no of course you don't, I'm the only person I know who does that.

EXCEPT FOR HOW FORREST DOES THE EXACT SAME THING.

SWEAR TO GOD, MORE AND MORE I AM CONVINCED WE ARE ACTUALLY THE SAME PERSON.

(It's maybe a dumb thing to get hung up on but he did that this afternoon and we talked about it and I could not stop smiling, I mean what the heck, THAT IS SO RANDOM.)

...SO HEY, COME TALK TO ME ABOUT THOR 2. (Beware of spoilers in the comments, obviously.)

In a plot twist surprising absolutely NO ONE, least of all me, and certainly not my mother, Forrest and I are now dating. ...Seriously, we've been spending SO MUCH TIME TOGETHER, and for weeks it's been like, "Is this a date? I'M NOT SURE," and we'd go do whatever and then I'd come home and I'd be like, "...I'M STILL NOT SURE." Like, he'd insist on picking me up and buying my dinner and buying my movie ticket, but then no moves would be made. It was HIGHLY CONFUSING but also highly enjoyable. I call it Captain America Dating. You know, dating the way Captain America would date you. Extremely politely and with no indecency of any sort.